Nothing

Between the Roots, I found nothing. Yesterday we had a power outage. I slept through almost all of it. By the time I got up, the power had just come back on and the house was slowly waking up again. A roommate had tried to make coffee earlier, only to have the power disappear just as he turned the pot on. At first he thought he had tripped a breaker, but then realized the whole house was out. So he did what any reasonable person would do in a crisis like that. He went out and bought a coffee. By the time I wandered out, the coffee pot was finishing a fresh brew. I poured myself a cup and noticed something strange. The house was quiet. The TV was off. People were outside. There was none of the usual background noise. For a few minutes, everything felt different, but I didn’t know why. Then I stepped outside with my coffee, the house started sliding back toward normal, and somebody told me there had been a power outage. I had missed the outage. But somehow I had caught the nothing. That quiet stayed with me. A hundred years ago, that kind of quiet would not have been unusual. Forty years ago, even twenty years ago, there were simply more times when nothing was happening. Not because life was empty, but because there was not always something available to fill every second. When I was growing up, we had one TV. Two channels most of the time, maybe three if the weather was cooperating and there happened to be a NASCAR race we wanted to watch. There were no cartoons waiting for me the moment I walked in the door. If I wanted to watch The Simpsons, I had to wait until six o’clock. Dinner was also at six, so half the time I recorded it on VHS and watched it later. There was no streaming service asking if I was still watching. We had a Nintendo, and I remember coming home from school and waiting for Mom to finish Super Mario Bros. for what was probably the thousandth time. She knew secret passages, shortcuts and hidden areas long before YouTube walkthroughs, gaming wikis or Reddit existed. She found them because she played. She experimented. She failed. She remembered. Then she showed me. Even our computer was not much of an escape from boredom. We had a 286, and unless you knew what you were doing, it was basically an expensive beige box. We booted into DOS, put in a 5¼-inch floppy, typed commands and eventually convinced Windows to appear. There was no clicking an icon and instantly entering another world. Half the adventure was figuring out how to make the thing do anything at all. And when there really was nothing to do, I usually found something. I cut the lawn. Picked rocks from the field. Harrowed. Drove the tractor around. Nobody was standing there handing me a chore list. A lot of the time I did those things simply because, at that moment, they were better than nothing. It probably helped that some of them gave me an excuse to drive something. Winter was even better. We lived at the top of a hill, so when the snow came, the driveway had to be cleared. For me, that was yet another excuse to drive. I got the machine. My sisters got the shovel. Fair division of labour, at least from where I was sitting. Nothing had a funny way of turning chores into entertainment. Living out of town made that kind of life even stronger. There was no walking down the street for a bag of milk, and yes, we really did have milk in bags. Visiting my closest friend meant a twenty-minute bike ride down the highway. Sometimes we would meet at the lake, swim for a while, then head home before dinner. Back then Tooth did not exist. I was just me, doing me things, getting into trouble in some of the best ways. Years later, Tooth did exist, but in a very different world. I could be sitting at my computer playing a game while a movie ran on a second monitor, Twitch played on a third, the TV was on for background noise, my phone sat within reach and the tablet acted as another panel for the game. Even if the power went out, I still had my phone. The battery worked. Cellular service often worked. Another tower might pick up the connection. The house could go dark and I could still scroll, watch, listen, message, search or distract myself. We have become very good at making sure there is always something. And maybe that is where we lost nothing. Today parents sometimes try to reduce screen time by filling a child’s schedule with activities. Sports. Lessons. Clubs. Camps. Programs. More opportunities. More structure. More things to do. None of those things are bad, but sometimes we become so afraid of children doing nothing that we leave them no room to discover what nothing can become. We replaced nothing with anything. Adults do it too. We fill the waiting room with our phones, the drive with podcasts, the walk with earbuds, dinner with television, and the quiet moment with a scroll. We have trained ourselves to treat an empty minute like a problem that needs fixing. But I am starting to change that. I spend less time surrounded by screens. I make things with my hands again. I get on my scooter and ride through the park. Once a week I go out and feed people who are living on the street. I can sit at dinner and actually talk to the person across from me. I can leave the house without my phone and somehow the world keeps turning. Tonight when I go out, I know I will see little pieces of nothing. A teenager sitting on a bench watching ducks in the river. A couple of kids fishing from the bridge. A family walking together with no phone in anybody’s hand. None of them are really doing nothing. They are noticing. Exploring. Talking. Thinking. Wandering. They are leaving enough empty space for curiosity to wake up and decide what comes next. I do not think the answer is to throw away technology and pretend the past was perfect. I like my screens. I like being able to find an answer in seconds. I like being able to build something digitally, print it into something I can hold, talk to someone across the world and carry more information in my pocket than that old 286 could have dreamed of holding. But I also think there is something worth protecting in the empty spaces. Even Jesus stepped away from the crowds. He walked away from the noise, the demands and the people who needed something from Him. He found quiet places. Maybe we need some too, not because nothing is useless, but because nothing gives everything else room to breathe. Yesterday I walked into a quiet house with a fresh cup of coffee and, for a few minutes, caught something I had not realized I missed. Nothing. And I think I need more of it. Not sitting inside waiting for something to happen. Not staring at a blank wall. Not scheduling “nothing” into a calendar until I ruin it completely. For me, nothing is getting on the scooter and seeing where I end up. It is the river, the park, the ducks, a conversation I did not plan, a road I did not expect to take. For me, nothing is adventure without an itinerary. Between the Roots, I found adventure in nothing. Maybe it is time we stop filling every empty space and ask ourselves a different question. What is nothing in your life?